David Bowie breaks album silence with a cryptic list of 42 words

David Bowie: began his list with effigies, indulgences, anarchist Jack Malvern Arts Correspondent, The Times Published at 12:01AM, April 27 2013 David Bowie has refused all conventional interview requests to promote his latest album, but he has allowed one fan an insight into his thoughts by providing a cryptic list of 42 words. The musician, who released The Next Day last month after withdrawing from recording for ten years, began his list with effigies, indulgences, anarchist in response to a request for a work flow diagram that would illustrate his thoughts while composing the album. Bowie, 66, gave the list to Rick Moody, a novelist and journalist who used the words to write a 12,000-word essay for The Rumpus website on how they relate to the music. Moodys analysis ranges from an 800-word exploration of succubus to a ten-word analysis of violence.

Moody wrote to Bowie saying that he wanted to understand the thoughts that were occupying the singer while he was writing the songs. I wanted to understand the lexicon of The Next Day, and so I simply asked if he would provide this list of words about his album, assuming, like everyone else waving madly trying to get his attention, that there was not a chance in hell that I would get this list Astonishingly the list appeared, and it appeared without further comment, which is really excellent, and exactly in the spirit of this album, and the list is far better than I could ever have hoped, and its exactly like Bowie, at least in my understanding of him, impulsive, intuitive, haunted, astringent, and incredibly ambitious in the matter of the arts. Bowie is a conceptual artist, it seems to me, who just happens to work in the popular song, and he wants to make work that goes somewhere new, and this is amply demonstrated by the list. In his introduction, Moody explains that he sought the list not because he is a Bowie obsessive, or that the singer once mentioned him at a concert during some stage banter, but because of the quality of the album. I am writing these lines because The Next Day, the recent album by David, is the unlikeliest masterpiece of the recent popular song, the best album by an otherwise retired classic rock artist in many, many years. He notes that most era-defining musicians struggle to maintain the quality of their output in their late work, citing artists such as Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Bryan Ferry, Elvis Costello, The Who and Paul McCartney. Andy Greene, a music writer at Rolling Stone magazine, asked whether the words were the tip of iceberg or, more likely, the entire iceberg. Do these 42 words mean that Bowie is gradually stepping back into the public sphere? Might he give us a few sentences next time? Maybe even a whole paragraph, or possibly an interview? How about some sort of performance? A concert? A tour? We shall see what comes, but these are 42 more words from Bowie than we had yesterday. The full list is: Effigies Indulgences Anarchist Violence Chthonic

Intimidation Vampyric Pantheon Succubus Hostage Transference Identity Mauer Interface Flitting Isolation Revenge Osmosis Crusade Tyrant Domination Indifference Miasma Pressgang Displaced Flight Resettlement Funereal Glide Trace

Balkan Burial Reverse Manipulate Origin Text Traitor Urban Comeuppance Tragic Nerve Mystification